In an attempt to try to bring FTV back to life and bring in some new features I present this new project with the first changes starting this Friday (GMT).

The end result (planned to be complete by April 2017) will be that FTV will merge forums with another site I operate (MATV) to allow us to consolodate the software license and it will allow FTV to gain new software and features. It will be a merger in the sense that there will be a single forum (FTV's forum) in terms of posts and members, but BOTH sites will still look like and operate as their original names.

So FTV will still be FTV, the name wont change, the url (address in your browser) etc will still be fansub.tv just as before but it will also get a bright and modern new look / design. The new design is closer to how the front page looks.

This is a large project which will take a long time and a lot of work to complete, there will be some times when things wont work or wont look right, and some times when I will have to take the entire site offline for a while.
I ask for everyones paitence during those times and while the main site is offline, FTV will be re-directed to a mini page that has some details / updates on whats going on.

Due to the large amount of work needed, it will be done in stages or 'phases' as follows:

Phase 0 (work already done so far)
A complete copy of Fansub.TV was taken and upgraded on a development server and a merge of the sites was tested. The new design/layout was also tested as well as ability to correctly operate as separate sites. This development site will be used to test and work out problems in advance of doing things to the main FTV site. So far it has been working very well and better than expected. Some of the original FTV site was also able to work again.

Phase 1 - Friday November 11th - Sunday November 13th - FTV will be offline.
This will allow me to take a backup of FTV and upgrade the forum to the right version for future work.

Fansub.tv will be redirected to a mini site to explain whats happening.
The original Fansub server will be shutdown
The entire server will be imaged and archived. In the event of a problem with the project, the entire of FTV can be restored like going back in time to that date.
Server started up
New forum software installed
Forum upgrade started
Testing
Server shutdown again
Entire server imaged again (its good to have backups at each stage)
server started up again
Fansub.TV directed back to the original server with new software.

Yes the 'interests' will need to be fixed, maybe if everyone put their longer lists of interests on the 'about me' page and just put shorter stuff on the 'interests' box.

A few glitches I found with that page:

There's a 100kb limit on uploaded images for it.

It appears to not upload at all.

It can however, load from a site, so you can post to imgur and load your avatar here.

Sorry everyone, I had thought I had checked that, I have now set it to 1,000 KB so you should be able to upload images now.

There are hundreds of settings and permissions, somehow I missed the profile pic size!

If anyone finds other limits like that which seem to be a bit 'harsh' or not sensible, please report it / post it here so it can be checked. Many settings got changed or put back to defaults during the upgrade, so for a while it will be a case of find the ones still wrong and I will fix them.

I also increased the amount of PMs which an be in the inbox, so you dont have to delete them so much now.

Here is what the new Gallery from the development site looked like after its 'Phase 2' was complete: (some of you may recognise the content is from MATV)

And heres a little something else that wasn't originally planned but might be a good replacement for the 'Episode updates' or 'front page'. What your seeing here is basically MATV but in Fansub colours with the Fansub forum posts. I'd really like to know what everyones thoughts are on this, as this is a working system on MATV, so its easy to have it fully working for Fansub.